Election of the Weekend II: Romania

This weekend is the runoff for presidential election in Romania. I covered the first round here. The outcome was quite grim; right-populist George Simion secured 41% of the vote, with Bucharest Mayor Nicusor Dan securing the second slow at 21%. This obviously makes Simion a clear favorite, although apparently he performed disastrously (and Dan quite well) in a recent debate and the two most recent polls are actually showing narrow Dan leads.

That said, Simion overperformed his polling in round one and the totality of the polling has him in the lead, so I wouldn’t raise expectations too much. In hindsight, whatever we may think of the Romanian establishment’s exercise in militant democracy with respect to former candidate Calin Georgescu on ethical or legal terms, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that it looks like a strategic failure. Georgescu’s lead of Lasconi was only 23-19 in the annulled election. As some commenters here noted, Bucharest voters were completely blindsided by the result–few had any idea who Georgescu was–and likely would have turned out to block him. I have to wonder if the social democratic establishment didn’t just want to block Georgescu but also Lasconi (who was center-right but pro-EU and generally sound on anti-corruption). At any rate, it seems to have created a significant backlash and affirmed, for some, the far-right’s criticism of the establishment. Simion seems ~90% as bad as Georgescu, and now seems more likely to win than Georgescu would have been last year. He’s a committed Trumper and has promised to give Georgescu a place of prominence in his adminstration. And they still couldn’t get the Social Democrat through round one.

A good opinion piece on the election in the NYT the other day, from a Romanian political scientist. One interesting note; Simion has been campaigning abroad these last few weeks, as apparently the Romanian diaspora, unlike the Moldovan diaspora, skews conservative and nationalist (Simion got 60% in round one from diaspora voters).